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October 2015

The civil war in Syria has driven millions of Syrians into forced migration and diaspora, creating a large-scale refugee crisis in Western Asia and Europe. The conflict emerged after the Arab Uprisings of 2011 and early 2012, when Bashar al-Assad’s regime cracked down on the Syrian population through censorship, arrests, and eventual military tactics. However, just as the Assad regime did not wake up one morning and decide to oppress its population, the population did not wake up one morning and decide to resist. The current struggle follows decades of resistance against authoritarian regimes in Syria, and writers have always been a part of that resistance.

Centered around the subject of anxiety, and featuring panels on diagnosis, treachery, and empathy, the (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest was held on Saturday, October 17th at the W. Dale Clark Library. Moderated by Lit Fest Director and Author of Swan Gondola, Timothy Schaffert, the event brought readers and writers together in a discussion of craft, the connection between narrative and literary responsibility, and anxiety’s influence on literature.

The infamous Axeman of New Orleans, having reigned in terror over the city from May 1918 to October 1919, killed his last victim on October 27, 1919. Mike Pepitone’s wife was surprised to find her living room turned into a blood-splattered canvas, with her husband and a ruined painting of the Virgin Mary at the foreground. Out of the corner of her eye she witnessed an ax-wielding shadow flee into the night.

UNL faculty member Joy Castro recently debuted her fifth book, How Winter Began, a collection of short stories. She is also the author of the novel Nearer Home and Island of Bones, a collection of essays, and is the editor for the anthrology Family Trouble. I asked her a few questions about her newest collection, her ideal audience, and her next writing project.

This week, we turn the spotlight to Fiona Sze-Lorrain, whose poem “A Matter of Time” appeared in the Winter 2014 edition of Prairie Schooner. In addition, she contributed a Prairie Schooner blog post, “Women and the Global Imagination: Laudomia Bonanni and The Reprisal,” earlier this summer. In Summer 2011, Christina Cook reviewed Sze-Lorrain’s first poetry collection Water the Moon in Prairie Schooner.

Your winning essay, “Working Girl,” explores female adolescence using irony and humor to move the story beyond mere teenage angst. The piece accomplishes this task in just a few short pages. What roles did compression and brevity play in your writing process? How do they work with—or perhaps because of—the subject matter?

In which interviews never end because conversations never end. Last week, Book Prize Coordinator Katie Schmid Henson interviewed novelist Kate Southwood about the process of writing and publishing her first book, the critically acclaimed Falling to Earth. After the interview, the conversation kept going. Here's a little bit more from the generous Kate Southwood about negotiating her roles as mother and writer.

Can you say a little bit more about the periods of time when you were not-writing, but still working on the composing process? How do you balance the work of parenting with the writing work that you do?

On October 13, 2012, Gerhard Richter, a German visual artist, set an auction record price for artwork sold by a living artist with his painting Abstraktes Bild. It sold for $34 million, but that record held only until 2013 when his piece, Domplatz, Mailand sold for $37.1 million in New York. Finally, Abstraktes Bild exceeded the record again in February 2015 when it was sold again, this time for $44.52 million in London.